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This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not
reflect the views of Moz.

Turn your computer up.

Now go here and play this song. Ready, Creator? We’re going to create the heart and soul of your SEO Strategy masterpiece right here, right now. Large black coffee advised.

If you’ve been following Steps 1-5 you’ve been taking notes on what you’ve found along the way, either in the Excel spreadsheets we’ve created or in a preliminary Strategy document for the customer or in a notebook or on your hand or wherever. These notes are going to be the seeds for Step 6 – the Strategy & Recommendations piece.

Like every other step of this 8-Step SEO Strategy you should do this in whatever style or format that feels best for you. I’m going to show you how I tend to put these documents together, but even my SEO Strategy documents change from client to client. So use your properly caffeinated noggin to create what your customer or your site teams need.

HERE’S WHAT YOU’LL NEED

We gathered some notes in previous steps, so let’s take a look back at what we might be able to throw into this document.

Here’s what I usually do. I create either two parts to the deliverable or I create two documents. In the first part/document, let’s call this Insights, I throw in all of the juicy insights I’ve found. I want to give the client a really good sense of what is going on – where the problem areas are, how they stack up against competitors, and maybe even where they’re doing well and have less opportunity to improve. Then I also have a second part or document that has custom, actionable strategy and recommendations based on what I learned from those insights. We’ll call this Strategy.

THE INSIGHTS PIECE

Here’s where we’ll take specific issues, data, etc that we found in all of our previous steps and give the client something that will help them understand where they stand now. The more visuals you can provide, the better. The client will like you much better if you give them nice charts and graphs than if you make them read a book and try to decipher your data.

Let’s look at some of the specific things you can put in this Insights piece.

From Step 1:

Recap who your target audience is. Be as specific as possible

List what they need, want, are interested in finding

From Step 2 & 3:

Particular keywords or groups of keywords that you highlighted. Is there a story there? Is there something that would be of value for your client to know?

Gaps: Reveal areas/keywords where the client has content but is not performing well. You do not need to give recommendations for how to fix this yet – we’ll do that in the Strategy piece.

Opportunities: Reveal areas/keywords where the client does not have content and might want to consider it.

From Step 4:

Reveal the top competitors you found and why. Clients often consider brick and mortar stores or competitors with the most Unique Visitors to be their competitors. Make sure they know who their competitors are in Search, since that is often different.

From Step 5:

You don’t have to use everything from your competitive research. Just pull out nuggets that are worth exposing to the client and that tell a story.

What features or content did competitors have that your client didn’t, but they might want to consider?

Were you able to find any negative sentiment about your client site? Make sure they know what people aren’t satisfied with.

Were you able to find any negative sentiment about your competitors? You can use this to move in on the areas where they are weak or don’t provide what your communities want.

If you found any major crawl issues that you’d like to expose here, put that into your Insights document too. Remember, in this example we’re putting all of the recommendations/strategy in a separate part or document, (although you could do it differently if you please) so right now you only need to show problem areas. Go as deep or stay as high-level as you want.

Show inlink comparisons between your client and their competitors

Optional: Add in traffic comparison charts between your client and their competitors

Optional: Add in any other competitive diagnosis you’ve done or insights you’ve found

Now that we’ve scared the pants off our client showing how dysfunctional their site is, let’s save the day and give them some solutions.

THE STRATEGY PIECE

I’ve got a template for this that I use each time and just add or delete whatever I need to. This template usually has these sections where I can fill in strategy and recommendations:

Specific Terminology to use

Specific Design elements to consider

Specific URL considerations

Specific Internal Linking to consider

Specific External linking to consider

Specific Partners to go after

Specific AJAX usage considerations

Specific Flash usage considerations

Specific Video considerations

Specific Blogging considerations

Potential Original vs. Syndicated content issues

Site Features and Content

Global Scope (Are there potential duplicate content issues from this content being shared by other Intls? If so, what specifically needs to be done to avoid these issues? What is the strategy for domains, hosting, and targeting Intl search engines?)

Your subcategories here

Here’s where you’ll provide solutions. This is probably the most flexible part of the entire strategy. This is your baby to build out as you please. The idea here is to provide specific, custom strategy and recommendations based on all of the stuff you’ve found. To cover other site issues or high-level SEO basics, you can consider either

Linking to SEO basics for each item listed here on the web or in your intranet. For example, our intranet at Yahoo holds over 200 pages of SEO best practices, so because this isn’t a best practices document, I would just link to URL best practices, linking best practices, etc from each section to provide additional guidance beyond any specific recommendations you’re going to give them here.

Providing a separate document with a more technical assessment or SEO best practices review. If you’re getting into recommendations for writing titles, meta tags, etc it might be a little overwhelming for this document. It’s ok to provide several deliverables to the client, but try not to overwhelm them with everything in one 200-page document.

You might not have any recommendations for AJAX or Global scope or any sections you have in this template, so then leave it out, or just point to best practices from that section.

Other considerations for your Strategy piece:

Separate recommendations by who will be implementing them. For example, put all of your content recommendations in one group for the Product Manager, all of your technical recommendations in a group for your web developers, groups for writers, designers, or whoever will be implementing.

Give each section or even each recommendation a priority. I did one of these where *each recommendation* was put into rows in (you guessed it) an Excel spreadsheet, and the columns had prioritizations and owners (developers, editors, designers, etc) for each one PLUS a scale for difficulty for each one. Make sure you charge appropriately for your time if you’re doing this. ;)

MAKE THIS YOUR OWN

Working with several different SEO/M vendors while at Yahoo, I got to see how each of them presented deliverables. Every one of them couldn’t be more different from each other, and this is OK. If you’re not satisfied with how I’ve put the Insights and Strategy together here, please do feel free to present your information how you see fit (and share with us in the comments if you’d like!).

When you’ve completed this Strategy document you can make a copy of it and take out all of the info and templatize it for use in future projects.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

Once you’ve done all of this and you’re happy with your deliverable, don’t close it up and send it just yet. In Steps 7 and 8 we’ll add two more simple things. You’ve done all of the hard work in steps 1-6, so now you can reward yourself with a little Irish coffee if you please. You deserve it.

Have ideas, thoughts, questions, Irish coffee recipes, etc you’d like to get off your chest? Please share with us in the comments!

35 Comments

I can't comment ... song still playing ... feel'n the need to run away from work and find a cafe with outside seating. I feel all Euro-fied now.

OK ... the song ended.

I love your series of guidelines because they represent years of work distilled into some solid fundamentals. Currently, I'm in a relatively new role (while also a new employee) and I find your examples beautiful because they represent my current priorities.

I'll certainly be taking what you have here and seeing where it fits into the documents, policies and processes that I have been lucky enough to create. Leveraging the history that went into what you are showing us will empower my own work.

Besides, your color boxes look nicer than the color dots I use in my own benchmarking score cards.

Laura, what a fantastic post! You would deserve a 1000 thumbs up only for being as open and transparant as you are!

Small question regarding your post: The thing that always interest/ bugs me is how to draw the line between indicating a problem (i.e. telling the client what is wrong) and explaining why it's a problem (i.e. giving them some, but not every SEO basics). How do you deal with that? In other words: What client personas would you give a 200+ document and with which would you send several documents (or keep the SEO basics part really small)?

Guess that question popped out a little larger, but I hope you got my point there.

Also I really want to thank you once again for this post!

I think it's Caffeine day today, not only you, but also Google has gone caffeinating the day :)

As I coddle a large doube-bagged black tea I will attempt to answer your excellent question with the caveat that my caffeine hasn't kicked in yet...

Personally I'm a bit overzealous with these documents and 200 pages is not entirely impossible. In cases where you have clients (or your in-house people) who really need the basics, that might be a good place to start before doing deep dives. Getting people on board with SEO by training them and giving them best practices resources to refer to is a good underlying base before getting into more advanced stuff. Othrwise a lot of this might be lost on them. Plus doing product strategy (which a lot of this is) might not entirely work if the site isnt at least covering a good portion of the basics.

If you're a contractor you could see it as more services to sell. If you're in-house, well I'm sorry but it's just more work to do. :)

On the 200-page thing - whether it's execs or clients, the high level story needs to be told as straightforward as possible in a primary document or presentation, and you can put the details that dont need to be up front and center in appendices or accompanying documents that you can refer to from your primary one. Even a 20 page document will often be overwhelming and end up being pushed aside because of that.

Funny to see that there are other people out there who tend to be overzealous on seo documents as well!

I think it also has something to do with getting people on board/ to convince them that this SEO strategy is the actual way to persue. But to achieve that you have to make them understand the necessity and consequences of the strategy.

That could be done with either 200+ pages or with 50, but I think (from what you're saying) getting close to the client needs/ reference level is the most important in the documentation.

The last thing that we want is to have our nice polished documents (and work) being pushed aside! :)

Definetely a very very very (is it enough?) good SEO Strategy teaching . I've learned a lot by reading your posts and those build really strong and fundamental basics to create, present and support a SEO Strategy to boss and/or clients.

This post was even meatier than usual Laura. It's going to take me a while to find a way to integrate these tips into my system.

I'm going to have to re-read it a few times for it all to sink in. It's printing out now and I expect this step will be dog eared by the time I'm done with it.

I've a question for you re: the above. In the "Here's what you'll need" section, you said the following Step 4: We determined our competitors
We probably wont use anything from this step""

Then in the section titled "The Insights Piece" you said about step 4 From Step 4:
Reveal the top competitors you found and why. Clients often consider brick and mortar stores or competitors with the most Unique Visitors to be their competitors. Make sure they know who their competitors are in Search, since that is often different.

It's good to know the competitions driving points, and being able to define why they're ranking for specific queries. However, high ranking doesn't always mean high conversion rates despite high traffic so it's important to really define the customers objectives, and unique needs defined in the first steps. I believe a lot of people get caught up in functionality for search, and forget about the end user which is where the conversions come from.

I think this one was really needed, because to write down and present a good deliveries is not really an easy moment, as we tend to include or too much or too few, without finding the needed equilibrium.

Then, it's also a strategic moment, as a great deliveries can set up the base for a satisfactory and - hopefully - long term relationship with the client.

I'll wait for the last two post, that I imagine are about Following Up and Verification (the future will tell if I am right).

If the goal is to create a set of industry standard documents for pitching and proposals then this is brilliant as it would level the playingfield between big and small players and focus on the deliverables and strategy within.

How about releasing them in template form for a small throw-away amount?

Your article is really great i just want to add to it Social media networking is much in use now a days. you have to decide the channel through which you can gain more in less pain Now a days social networking is growing so much day by day, if you want to grow your business you need to go through these channels certainly. unless you are not so lucky that you are top 10 of a keyword that is really generating traffic to your but no one in this world is as such who doesnot want to grow. and these channels provide a good way to grow. It is upto you to decided according to your requirements that which social media you need to prefer and which channel is giving you best results.

Thanks for this great article Laura. This 8-steps strategy you're giving us will find its place in my paper-version-documentation for sure! :)

I honestly tend to simplify some of the points and strategies you mention, as often some of the people interested in SEO in my area are cornershops with mom-and-pop websites and small budgets, and that it wouldn't be time-efficient (and cost-efficient) for me to go through all these steps to build their strategy - But thanks for such great in-depth explanations! It's nice to be able to take or leave some of this valuable information, depending of the context in which we need to use it!

As for my irish coffee recipe, here it goes! You'd better be prepared to an awesome one! :)

I have a question. You have not mentioned yet about resources and how to allocate them efficiently: Budget, benefits (how is this going to improve their business), people needed, time to accomplish the job, etc. Clients do want to know this more than anything. Maybe this is coming in the next two posts?? Thank you.

I like the way you think SEO Practices. Good project management will address Time, Scope and Cost (although oftentimes that might be up to the project manager on the site, but you can help them by contributing where you can). Priorities and resources are addressed in the last post (going up in a few hours), and where those are addressed in the document you could surely add additional insights like cost, time, etc.

You might want to check into some stuff on optimizing for AJAX and/or Flash. Although its slowly getting better, there are still often issues in crawling or indexing some of the pages and/or content when it's presented in javascript or Flash.

If your client is experiencing these issues you can point them out (and potentially the business they could be losing because of it) in these sections.

It's a good job done. But i want to ask one thing that this is the 6th step and if anyone who wants to go through your last 5 steps then what to do? I s there any option on getting those!! I like the post and bsically the tips on how to customize the strategy.